[DAY :043]

[nirsighted]

[Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Late in the evening, the pervasive thrum of Nirad's mental presence returns to Bearings. It winds higher - unwrapping, lengthening, widening: small flashes of silver, memories like the scales of so many fish glimpsed through the lapping water of some distance, unfamiliar water. A wet street reflects the glow of neon signs above it; a doorway, rain drizzling off the landing above it; a stream of traffic glittering through the half light--]

( Hi. We're back from following that Ahtaliah Ven guy. Aoba's head is hurting him so he's going to take a break I think but I guess I can tell you what we saw? )

[He doesn't sound hesitant so much as he does distracted.]

( Honestly I didn't see anything very interesting, but maybe it was a bad day for him? Maybe you can't be a bad guy every day of the week, right? Anyway, he worked pretty late then me and Aoba followed his car to a place where he got dinner. It's a nice car. He met with someone there. A lady. A friend, I think, but I don't really know. Maybe we should have followed her instead though because after they had dinner, Ven went home. So we have his address and how to get access to his building and I know which apartment he lives in and if we wanted to get in it seems like it might be pretty easy because he spends so much time at work, you know? I'm sure he's got some super high tech security at home but it's not like he owns the building so it's probably just inside his penthouse or whatever. Uh. Yeah. )

[BUZZZZZZZZZZZZ.]

Comments

[vocalis]

[ For a moment he grows quiet to think. He hasn't been given much freedom to think. Locked away in the back of his own mind, hidden alongside a power that can only malign, his thoughts had been nothing but chaos and desire for destruction for so long. Out here at the front he's capable of deeper thought, if he just takes the time for it.

But these are thoughts that hurt - his wants, his desires beyond destruction and pain. What he wants most is to be recognized by all the fragmented pieces of his mind. Thanks to the symbiote, Angel is now one of those pieces too. To be accepted by her - it's a step towards how he wants to be acknowledged. ]

I want you to know me. Recognize me. Accept me, because he doesn't.

Know that I am always listening when you speak, Angel. I remember everything. He doesn't-- he doesn't remember it. Any of it.

My power.

The people I destroyed.

That I was the original.

[ His temper, not so unlike his counterpart's, is rising rapidly. Though his anger is not directed at her, she makes a good outlet.

A memory is offered to her, a broken shard of glass she may cut herself on if she takes it. Years ago, he'd been great at a game-- no, the the best at it. Similar to Bout it Out of Concordia, Rhyme was fast paced, aggressive, and required players to link their minds to a virtual playing field. That's where he made a name for himself and his power. The player in the memory falls to the virtual floor, then the real floor, screaming and clutching their head as the other player - Rhyme name: Sly Blue - destroys every inch of their mind from within. ]

Know this, and accept me. I am Aoba just as much as he is Aoba.

But I am also Sly Blue.

[circumspector]

[ He presses it into her hands, and there's a hiss, as it digs into the sensitive webbing of her mind where brood lives. Sharp edges in the pad of her thumbs, the bit of flesh at her wrist. How he holds it up and into her and - she's no stranger to it, she takes it, greedy as she is for this closeness, even now, the pain of it is nothing at all.

Not between Petre, not between the things she's done.

( Aoba... )

[ Takes it in part, Aoba, with the screaming and wretched and destructive in mind. In their minds. For a second, she lets it push her under, lets herself become part of his memories even as an observer to the feeling. Feelings herself float, absorbed into it.

Then she draws up, gasping, coughing, shaking, his rage too, filling her up and that she has to shut down. She cannot ever let any of their emotions get the best of her. ]

( You... you know then. ) [ If he saw then, then he'd know what she so briefly, so quickly when she could not help it, show him flashes of Pandora, the violence and muck and bloodshed. He said he saw everything Aoba did. Did he enjoy that, she wondered? ] ( That I can... I can give you space for this, in me, if ... he won't. For the time being. You just have to reach for me, and I can give you as much destruction as you can want, for as long as you need it. Until he... learns, I can know you for what you are. )

[ Her wet bloody fingers of his memories, she sinks into dry earth, oh - she can give him destruction and acceptance of it in the same breath. ]

[vocalis]

[ The way she takes the memory is... surprising. As if hungry for it, he watches as she presses it into herself despite the jagged, twisted nature of it. She doesn't back away, or deny it and hide it immediately the way his counterpart does, and he's impressed. Slowly, his attention turns on her, more focused this time. Though he claims he's always listening and remembering, he's drawn out now, growing less aloof as he listens, truly, to what she has to say.

Because now, he's intrigued. ]

I remember.

[ The image of the blood soaked land she put in their mind upon their first meeting is drawn out again. It's where Aoba keeps all the things he doesn't want to think about - with him. Perhaps he shouldn't have been so surprised by her reaction, with this being a memory of the place she once called home.

He holds it there for both of them to see, like examining an old photograph. He then tucks it away again, but the smell of blood - he keeps that memory at the front of his mind. Angel is right in her guess - he does like it. Images of chaos and pain, control and destruction. He imagines he would've liked this world she came from. He could've destroyed so many minds, and not just through a silly video game.

Outside the connection, Sly Blue settles where he lies in Nirad's bed. He is tired, and though he enjoys every bit of pain still pounding away in his head, there is still only so much he can handle. So he makes himself comfortable, and widens his connection to Angel a little more. ]

All right. I accept.

Now show me..

[ Tell him a sick bedtime story, little Angel. ]

cw: gore, torture, acts of sexual violence, animal cruelty, cannabalism, etc, etc

[circumspector]

[ It comes well tied - after the explosion, so she can now coat those memories as they should have been. Rich with the rot, the slick, and the mess that comes with the living being pulled apart. She unfurls herself like flicking out her wings, - and she's called Angel, and she knows in the old stories, of a God that no one quite remembers anymore, that angel's reigned down destruction in their Holy Father's name.

So too, has she.

It's like stretching a muscle she pretends she doesn't have, unused in the depths of her. The hive has no need of memories of so much death. The world that has no reference to anything most of them talk about. There is no meaning, there's no rightness to it. No one can set Pandora to rights because it took those that tried and ripped them limb from limb. It took it's chosen and bathed them the way only it could - in blood, in fire. It's in her hands, in her throat, as she breaths out, and she brings herself to him. To enthral him with that which he wants most. Her bloody fingers to proverbial hair, where she knows it hurts Aoba, it is why she does it: that special intimacy that comes with shared cruelty. She has a mind the size of a planet and thousand, thousand eyes, a hundred, hundred ears and a million lifetimes of destruction to bestow. All of them open, all of them turn towards him. Every unspeakable thing that is written on her body, crawled from another dimension to wrap around her.

Opens her mouth, breathes out the thick chemical amaranthine smoke and it rolls one memory after another, builds the walls around him inside of her, lets him sink into that sandy blood soaked earth and have, have, have. It has no beginning, middle or end, it begins with a scream, the groan of the earth in want of the blood, and it ends with the same. But what she gives him is a thousand new ways to inflict misery. Ways that only insanity really reaches the depths of, living and writhing deep inside of her body. Why she shrugs when Petre devours the living, that she can lean over Sly Blue's shoulder and just huff a breath against his hair of faint amusement.

The reason why she knows herself best suited to them both.

She splits apart her memories to him, pries apart her own ribcage like the psychos did their victims. Latches onto him and drags him under like the creatures she was named for -- all sweet song and devouring. She takes without discrimination, sucking whatever is within reach into herself. In that place, there is no hope, there is just a series of moments that are called existence so far as they are happening, they are all happening just the same even as she is not there to see them anymore, and what she gives him is one day. Just the one, from sunrise to sunrise. From the badlands to the fridge, in every flickering, wretched detail. One day is enough, after all, to drive knows that is enough to drive people to the worst of their own depths.

— There is a planet, she begins this story. It is a planet at the far end of the furthermost known galaxy, in the border worlds. It has been brushed by civilisation but never constructed by. It has castles, made from the ruined corporations that tried to hold it. It has knights and maidens and squires and witches. One moment to comprehend it all before she drags him down into it. In the mess and the thick and the screaming. Then there is no abate, a series of images that has no reference at all, and they come one after another, after another, after another.

The planet turns and a skag mother devours her young, beating it's head to death on a boulder before she eats out its body small helpless body. A child grasping hands over its mouth, begging herself not to cry as the animals pitched screaming gets louder and louder from the pups squalling before it dies. This is the child that kills, gun in her hand, an accident but doesn't even look back at the person that stumbled onto her. This is the soldiers who don't look where their merciless metal pierces through chest and body when they shoot that child, kicking the body away as they laugh about what they're having for dinner tonight, there doesn't look like there's enough meat on her scrawny starved bones to feed more than three of them. This is the thresher that wraps those soldiers up in an encompassing embrace of its tentacles and rips them apart. Dragging them into its mouth and sinking into the ground as a battalion is reduced to a handful of stragglers, desperately hiding in the mouth of an old mining facility whilst stone ancient figures look on. This is the earth that cracks under their feet, the earth that groans and spews forth what will destroy them, and most especially what they're there for. The purple inky chemical that settles into flesh, destroys, mutates, remakes the living into its own design. The twisted, heaving figures that were once men, and somewhere under all that still are. That go mad, then change. Muscles too big and heads too small. Necks that gape open with bones poking through, where they feel nothing but their own pain and want always for more. They cannot look at themselves, mad as they have gone. They peel the faces off of the still sane and wear them over their own masks that they can no longer breath without, like somewhere deep below they might be themselves until the hunger consumes again. The creatures that want to be left alone but can't for the voices still screaming inside their own head. They seek to quiet themselves with the loudness of all else in wretched choirs of flesh tearing, blood seeping. The blood, the scream, there must always be more. There is nothing worse than the silence which answers back with the people they used to be.

Instead, they dress in sadistic gluttony. They thread their mutated bodies with barbed wire. Their lips, their fingers, their spine, then the sensitive places, places of love so they insist: love, love, love as they split the foreskin of their cocks with metal barbs, through cunt and clit, their ankles, through the nipples - this one has four where his pectorals have doubled on his chest, beautiful strength twisted over itself, and he feels each with a rapturous agony as he sinks his nails in to tear the flesh apart with his own hands. Love, love, love they whisper that comes from screaming in pain the minutes before, and rutt against each other until skin tears, metal catches against metal and tendons strips itself away from the bone and acidic froth bubbles at their lips like infected animals. Hooked on each other because sanity is still clinging together, shoving fingers into each other's wound, so that nails can scrape through from the inside. It is just this little better than killing in the forgotten state where after, the living turning to whoever is left and peel skin and muscle away from bones. Children raised to lick the blood from the wire that drips with flesh and blood, rusting and festering in the setting sun. They begin to eat and feast. As they pick at, so too are they picked off without clemency by this planet. The rakks find the stragglers, take them in claws and lift them up to great heights that they scream of flying like the Gods do, and find themselves dropped and their bodies shatter in one Icarian moment of reaching too far to the left behind things that only turned them into this.

Pandora, she says, is where the abandoned of the universe rot, when the sunsets. Pandora is where it is to forget you were ever a man. Pandora is where love is to hurt, and she wraps her bones around his mind, and she pushes into him - is no exception. She opens her mouth with their screams, she is sexless, genderless, burning, a mouth that opens to wide, a mind that must have it all, both here and that far off there. The Guardian of this all, and when she screams they die, flaring with light. She sears their minds, their mouths, their eyeballs burst, their flesh melts and with a flick of their thoughts through their systems, she denies them even the air they breathe. She burns because she is the earth of this cracked planet and like it, she bleeds violent, violet, vivid, between the pores of her skin until she is not really there. She's a haze of murder and those thousand, thousand eyes are staring, watching, without sleep or sustenance save for where she licks her opened up wrists that seep down her body to consume herself like the psychos rip teeth into their own flesh. Flickering them over her body and through her with the same need. She is no different, she is no different, she is of Pandora.

Because she is a siren, and they are lights in the dark - but why would that ever that promise peace here, in this place? Pandora has no need for peaceful goddesses of many faces, as she shows him the other who are worshipped like she is, in the maelstrom of blood and adoration, they burn and capture and destroy and curl over those that need them like a hungry beast. Good then, that he doesn't want that, she doesn't have that to give, as holds him into it. Because she can give him that's all her own is a thousand screams and pain, all her own, that splits her apart from the inside that is so encompassing that like everything else from this wretched place, it's destruction is pure and she pushes it into him. Holy things left at the shrine of her mortal body and eternal markings.

It has no beginning, middle, end, she tells him, there is no happy ever after, but there is a until forever. When the memories fade and the screaming abate to a distant muted tone, there is just her and him and the destruction like seas to drown in. ]

[vocalis]

[ She is like a drug. She would know, as she shows him all the horrible things pumped into her, into the other poor souls of her wretched world. He sinks into the fire of her mind, the memories of pain and chaos like a lullaby to him.

To Scrap.

He watches the way each living thing is picked off with an odd sense of comfort. Life continues even here, but he takes more pleasure in surveying the twisted ways it all eventually comes back to a miserable end. It's horribly imbalanced here, and he delights in it. With every new destructive act witnessed, he's inspired. There is a creativity to even the simplest destruction. When something is broken, it's energy is changed. He feeds off that energy, growling for more, always insatiable.

There is so much more variety than the chaos his world, that tiny locked-in island. On a place like Pandora, he could've been and done so much more. Destroyed so much, and it would have been nothing but another part of the planet's daily cycle, horrible in it's normalcy.

Eventually the pain of her memories and the real pain in his own head begin to overpower him. As wonderfully twisted as all of Pandora is, it's overwhelming. Sinking deeper, he falls when the screams reach a deafening pitch and the fires burn so hot he can no longer feel.

Asleep in the presence of a fiery Angel. ]

[circumspector]

[ She smoothes the hair away from his face, soft, gently brushes as she bears him down in the white noise of all that suffering. Where his mind can be in turned with the bloody sand like he ought to be. Humming, careful now, no need to startle him. How he goes like a child that has had too long a day and finds himself exhaustedly clinging to a comfort. Lets him hold as tight to the misery she constructs around him until he cannot hold any later.

Then, for the other, she leans in gently, kissing his forehead, like the sister she felt to him. Making sure he was settled in something comforting as his other half destruction.

Later, she will think on this. Like Krieg, she supposes, something brutal and insane and destructive, but still - still hanging on to the rest of him. Hums, perhaps she was suited to him too, after all. She would never turn away from either of them, Aoba ( either of his halves ) or Petre, not after Parker the first time. Not for this thing that gave her life where everything else only sought to take it away. It wanted to be close to them, so she let them be. There would never be a question how she drew them in as tightly as she could.

Pulls away from his mind, lets the memories fall away, shaking herself of the worst of the violence that was inherent, worn out, exhausted with the force of it.

Then she reaches out again, to a different person this time. Tired sounding, now. ]

( Nirad? )

[nirsighted]

[He isn't so tired, isn't so worn thin. This is-- normal. It's normal for things to be broken and jittering, for things to wobble or pull. A small boat anchored by a worn rope, snapping hard on its tie as the waves under it rise and fall, as they tug and push and cajole. When she calls for him, his mind turns to her directly. The buzzing presence of it expands--]

( Hi. )

[Easy enough. There aren't any barriers to him.]